Featured

Despite the many books on preaching, bad homiletical models of expository preaching still exist. They come from various sources and are influenced by a variety of factors. Often it is not the model itself that is at fault, but the use made of it. They include:
1. The Puritans
With ...
Keep Reading

Many Protestant scholars venture earlier into church history and lay the blame for this division at the feet of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Among Protestant thinkers, there seems to be a kind of allergy to the work of Aquinas. Francis Schaeffer, for example, is one who would lay much of the blame for today's schizophrenic view on Aquinas. Schaeffer argued that the root of modern man's trauma lies in the separation that Aquinas made between the realms of nature and grace. The realm of nature is the daily arena of his visible world, the scientific inquiry. The realm of grace is the supernatural realm of God. If Aquinas did in fact separate nature and grace, then certainly Dr. Schaeffer would be correct in pointing the finger at Saint Thomas for causing a significant part of modern man's dilemma. I plead for Aquinas, that he was not guilty of the charge. Aquinas did everything in his power to prevent a separation of nature and grace. He labored tirelessly to combat the efforts of philosophers who were making such a separation. Let us briefly consider the historical background.
Keep Reading

"We, the Slovak People, bearing in mind the political and cultural heritage of our predecessors...mindful of the spiritual bequest of Cyril and Methodius...adopted this constitution." Slovakia, lying at the crossroads of East and West in secular Europe, after being dominated for over forty years by a government that was no friend to Christianity, introduced its constitution by acknowledging its debt to two Christian missionaries from the ninth century.
Keep Reading

Here is the watershed of human history where the misery of the race is transformed into grandeur. Here the kerygma, the proclamation of the early church, was born with the cry "He is risen." We can view this event as a symbol, a lovely tale of hope. We can reduce it to a moralism that declares, as one preacher put it, "The meaning of the Resurrection is that we can face the dawn of each new day with dialectical courage."
Keep Reading

Hebrews is one of the most significant books in the New Testament for understanding the relationship between the old and new covenants. There are a number of helpful commentaries on the Book of Hebrews, and the following are five of the best.
Keep Reading

Devoted to the Apostles' doctrine (Acts 2.42) as we Christians want to be, we need to make sure that Christ's resurrection has as much significance to us as it had to the Apostles. In 1 Corinthians 15, we have a passage where we are reminded how important Christ's resurrection was and how important that event should be to us.
Keep Reading

It was many years ago when my grandmother related to me games that she played as a little girl in the 1880s. One game she mentioned was one that she and her Methodist girlfriends played with their Roman Catholic friends. In a playful jest of the words of the Mass, my grandmother would say, "Tommy and Johnny went down to the river to play dominoes." Here the word dominoes was a play on the use of the term Domine that occurred so frequently in the Catholic rite of the Mass. The children, of course, were revealing their lack of knowledge of the words of the Mass because they were spoken in Latin.
Keep Reading

"Pray with your mouth, cry out with your heart, make petitions while you work, so that every day and night, every hour and moment, God may always assist you." These are the words of the ninth-century, Christian noblewoman, Dhouda. She penned these words of admonition to her son William. She was concerned that her oldest son, a page in the court of Charles the Bald, would understand what it means to be a godly man. Dhouda's Handbook for William contained wise counsel to her son concerning the necessity of daily prayer, his conduct in public worship, and the importance of his reverence in prayer, in worship, and in all of life.
Keep Reading

The military of ancient Rome really blew it. When it came to the resurrection of Jesus, the troops who guarded his tomb could have saved us all a lot of time and trouble by just giving up his dead body. One problem: they never did. They didn't because they couldn't. And they couldn't because, despite what you may have read, the resurrection of Jesus was and is a well-attested fact, perhaps the best-attested fact of antiquity.
Keep Reading